Monday nights are my starter for 10

I don’t tend to go out on a Monday night. You?

I’m sure you don’t. Most people want to put their feet up after the first day back at work after a weekend stuffed full of chores. Well that’s why I don’t go out.

Hence an obsession with “University Challenge”. Which is on BBC2 on Monday nights.

Now you may not be able to tell but I did go to university. When I say university I mean drama school, which may not be the same thing but I did get a degree. Just.

However these kids, dare I say kids, are so amazingly intelligent it’s worth tuning in just to get annoyed at their intellect.

Which is how it started for me. Lots of tutting and sighing. “Far too intelligent,” I would mutter. “Why do they need to know that,” I would utter.

Then UC got me. I answered one question right.

It was a dead easy one, something about “King Lear” by Shakespeare, which I have performed, twice, so I should know the answer.

I did have to dredge the small matter they call, in some people, memory but eventually the answer appeared like a spring daffodil, squeezing itself out of the dark soil.

From then on I was hooked. Desperate to answer any question, about anything.

Do you know how many questions I have managed to answer in this series. Three.

Yes, a full three questions. I’m pretty darn pleased with that.

However I am sat watching the final, which for your information is between Manchester and Oxford and I haven’t a clue what the questions mean let alone what the answers are.

I feel like a dunce at the back of the class.

Jeremy Paxman, the man with the questions is speaking so fast I need subtitles by which point the teams have answered those questions, painted a few masterpieces and written a couple of operas.

You know what though, the good thing about this being the final is that for six months I won’t have this intelligentsia mocking me from behind a television screen.

By which point I will have forgotten how much of an idiot I feel and all I will remember is my joyous King Lear answer.

Monday nights just won’t be the same.